In recent years, services with which a user may be blessed becomes more and more diversified, and the services may include vehicles such as a train, a bus, an airplane, a theater, a movie theater, an amusement place, and concert hall etc. In addition, an age, the distinction of sex, and a purpose of the person to have the services become diversified and therefore, amounts of users for services have increased such that loads for managing entrance and exit of users of services becomes heavier and heavier. In many cases, the entrance and exit management in the above services so far has been done by examining a ticket when a user pass through a management point, such as, for example, ticket gates for allowing users to have services which are placed at a station, a theater, a movie theater, or a concert hall.
However, the above ticket gate makes a slot against flow of the visitors resulting in inevitable restriction of flow of visitors as well as lowering efficiency of the entrance management. Although a lot of ticket points may be provided by the reason described above, examination of the right information for services by human hands each time for entrance limits the process efficiency and wastes personnel such that the process efficiency for verification of the right information for services upon entrance and exit has impeded improvement in quality and amount of the services.
Conventionally, the rights for services are provided with users by purchasing directly a ticket from a automatic vendor etc., or by reserving and purchasing a ticket through a telephone, a facsimile, Internet, or a reservation window beforehand, and thereafter by receiving the ticket at the receiving window. These procedure is rather simple and familiar to users while requesting for users physical behaviors to receive the ticket, and hence provides inconvenience with the user and the user must elaborately go to the site where the receive window is placed or must stand in line when being crowded. Further to the above, if the user wants to change or cancel the reservation after receiving the ticket, a physical behavior to exchange or to refund the ticket cost must become necessary.
In further recent years, in order to solve the above described inconvenience, an automatic ticket gating machine, which automatically reads magnetically recorded information for services and automatically verifies the exploit right, is widely used. More recently, along with extension of information technology, cash-less technology, and popularization of a portable information terminal, portable storage terminals such as a magnetic card and an IC card which contain right information such as user information, charge information, and reservation information are proposed.
In the entrance and exit management using such portable storage means, users carry only a portable storage means such as the IC card, and a server compares a user information and a right information which comprises the user information and a content of the service for managing entrance and exit for the services to be enjoyed by vehicles or at a theater or a concert hall using a automatic ticket gating machine.
The automatic ticket gate system may enhance managing increased volume and lowering service costs. Various procedures for entrance and exit management and reservation management using the portable storage means such as above described IC card has been proposed so far, and for example, in Japanese Patent Publication (Laid-open) No. 2001-195484, a verification system of a user ID without the work for reservation verification by human hands, in which a ticket less process for issuing a ticket or entrance is provided using a portable information terminal, a on-site terminal, and a reservation management server.
With referring to FIG. 28, an above described conventional verification system for a user identification information (hereafter referred to user ID) using a master server is described. As depicted in FIG. 28, in Japanese Patent Publication (Laid-open) No. 2002-195484, the master server 200 controls the automatic ticket gating machine 202 to read the information recorded, for example, in a portable storage means of visitors accessing to the automatic ticket gating machine and to transmit to the master server 200 the read information. The master server 200 determines the exploit right from the registered reservation information and transmits verify information to the specified automatic ticket machine 202 to activate gates or alarms. In the conventional system shown in FIG. 28, all of the exploit rights for services is determined by the master server. Then high access frequency lowers a system processing rate due to the increase of the load of the server for managing reservations as well as causing overflow thereof, which may lead to the drawback that the processing efficiency of the automatic ticket gating machine 202 is lowered.
In order to overcome the drawback of the verification system shown in FIG. 28, the system comprising servers, for each managing the associated automatic ticket gating machines, other than the master server 200 (hereinafter referred to local servers), may be provided; the local servers receive the electric ticket information stored on the master server 200 as dead copies of the electric ticket information may reduce the above described drawback. With referring to FIG. 29, the automatic ticket gate system, which comprises the server 200, local servers 204, and the automatic ticket gating machines 202, is depicted.
As shown in FIG. 29, the user information read from the automatic ticket gating machine is stored tentatively in the local server 204. The local server 204 stores the right information comprising the user information and the service contents which had been sent from the master server 200 beforehand. The user information and the right information are compared to activate the gates or alarms of the automatic ticket gating machine. In the automatic ticket gate system shown in FIG. 29, inquiries from the automatic ticket gating machine 202 are processed in each of the local server 204 such that the load overhead caused by concentration of the inquiries to the master server 200 may be avoided.
However, illegal accesses, for example, multiple access with the identical right can not be prevented if the event that the exploit right for the service has been used, that is, the reserved service has been enjoyed is not acknowledged to the other local server 204 after the verification of the right information for services. FIG. 30 shows the process of the local server 204 in the automatic ticket gate system depicted in FIG. 29. As shown in FIG. 30, the master server 200 frequently transmits with the local server 204 when the user passes through the automatic ticket gating machine using his or her reserved rights or each time the user cancels or changes the reservation by accessing the master server 200. In the case that a lot of local servers are placed, it is necessary to reflect such changes and updates of the right information promptly to the local servers.
The overhead on the above local server 204 causes another drawback which lowers the entire system efficiency due to the overhead to the local server 204, because mutual information management must be required between the master server 200 and the local servers 204 such that transmission traffics are increased though the local servers 204 have been introduced other than the master server 200.
Japanese Patent Publication (Laid-open) Heisei No. 10-78940, for example, a master node is provided with ability for request to obtain a ticket in a multi-node information processing system constructed as a multi-processor system by determining the master node with a ticket generator constructed as a hardware, and by storing an address of the ticket generator at each node in order to distribute quickly a ticket as used to an identifier or a ravel uniquely identifying tasks or events. The ticket used in Japanese Patent Publication (Laid-open) Heisei No. 10-78940 likely means numerals used as identifier (ID). Therefore, the increase of overhead of transmission traffic associated with cancel or change and/or update of tickets are not objectives to be solved, and hence there are still needs to provide the system which automatically verifies and processes the exploit rights of users for services with high reliability and high efficiency.
As described above, the following requirements must be fulfilled to provide a automatic ticket gating system with high reliability, automatic verification ability together with high efficiency:
(1) to be able to manage the cases in which a lot of managing sites are provided and access frequencies of users are high;
(2) to be able to manage effectively the usage, change, and cancel of the rights with respect to the right information,
(3) to complete entrance and exit process by comparing the user information and the right information belonging to the user. However, the conventional processes or systems have not been sufficient.